Why is it important that the Father and the Son are not confused? How much of what I believe is church tradition? What does Sola Scriptura mean when confronted with the orthodox doctrines of Christianity? Here are snippets of my journey.

Monday, 17 July 2017

I AM TORN between two directions. I want to resume the survey of Lord Jesus Christ as soon as possible, as it simply covers so much important ground and is gathering fresh interest including a referral from Hurtado's blog himself. I also want to explore my deepening hunch that we need to be clearer that, like us, all of our predecessors in the Christian faith were also interpreters of that which preceded them. That is to say, in some clearer sense than before, we need to do away with the ideas that the "divinely inspired" writers of the New Testament were not interpreting according to principles that still govern us today. Same is true of Christian interpreters in the second, third and fourth centuries too. Obviously much more to be said about that. A key author in this field is Paul Ricœur, for whom I have received a specific request to relate his "arbitration" work to the question of the unfolding articulation of the centrality of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the first centuries (I also note that my article on hermeneutics received considerably more interest than average, see Hermeneutic Circle and asking better "why" questions).

Since it has always been the goal of this blog to not disenfranchise my French readers, and this second author is French (and I am reading him in French), I propose to do just a few posts (I'm aiming at three) in both languages on Ricœur and then pick things up again with Lord Jesus Christ.

The title I am referring to is The Conflict of Interpretations, which speaks directly to the sharply differing views to which I have been exposed over the last few years, and in many senses encapsulates the direction taken by the Triune Hub model I have been developing. English citations are my translations (which, since I am still grappling with Ricœur, may not be perfect, apologies). Page numbering is from the 2013 edition of Conflit des Interprétations: Essais d'Herméneutique, by Editions du Seuil, which is virtually unchanged from the original 1969 edition by the same publisher.

Our first citation seems to confirm this conviction that interpretation is integral not only to our acquisition of historical information but also the way in which that was originally composed itself in the past:No striking interpretation can be drawn without borrowing from the modes of understanding available at a given time: myth, allegory, metaphor, analogy, etc. (p. 24)

Not only can we note that it that interpretative processes are constantly active, both now and the periods in the past that seems so vital to us, but that this leads us to a second observation: because this hermeneutic circle hugely exceeds the lifespan of any given interpreter, we should surely consider a real collective thought, comprehension and interpretation ascribable to the Church. This collective consideration may be close to Chad McIntosh's illustration of "Group Persons" in his exploration of new philosophical possibilities for a tri-personal God (see my 2015 article: "Jésus Sois Le Centre").

In surveying the early 20th century efforts to place Hermeneutics more centrally within the scope of human sciences, Ricœur covers Dilthey and his hermeneutic problem, which is profoundly psychological. This is because interpretation (e.g. of a text) is a small part of an individual's wider field of semantic reference, his "comprehension". To understand anotherperson thus becomes seriously problematic and requires some form of conscious reception mechanism:

"To understand is to transport oneself into the life of another; historical comprehension brings into play the full force of historical inquiry: how can a historical being understand historically his history?... This is the major difficulty that can justify how phenomenological search for a reception mechanism, like grafting it onto a young plant" (p. 26).

And so we are just about ready to observe the absolute relevance of this study of hermeneutics to the question of the late fourth-century emergence of the Triune God and face the choices hermeneutics place before us.

"There are two ways to root hermeneutics phenomenologically, the short route and the long route. The short route is that of ontological comprehension"

The short route, to cut a long story short (!), is more problematic. It's like attempting historical surgery, and, most fascinatingly for our own interest in the Trinity, is obsessed by ontology. Guess what? That is precisely the form of expression (I choose these words carefully) that the victorious fourth-century bishops were so concerned adopting their understanding: identification of the Son with the Father and the Spirit, via... something ontological a.k.a. ousia. Here I need to be very careful not to mix up two independent critiques. We can criticise the fourth-century "Homoousians" (those who believed in the "consubstantiality" of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) for inappropriate hermeneutic integration of their predecessors, or we can criticise later (e.g. 21st-century) historians for inappropriate hermeneutic integration - presuming some of the ontological categories to be valid while simultaneously stating that such categories cannot be applied to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Assuming those ontological categories are biblical, you could perhaps continue to say the usage of those categories is downright "unbiblical", transgressing stacks of sound exegetical practice, and so on, while not seeking out what lay behind the form.

The Long Route, on the other hand, will not devoid itself of ontology, but will access it via nuanced semantics, "by degree". That is a good term for my model of the Triune Hub: "semantics", which would seem to be situated within Ricœur's second category of hermeneutic. Why is that? I have a hard time explaining to some seasoned philosophers who reason in more black and white categories what I mean by this "hub". Semantic is a very good word to describe it. I also like "space" - I am referring to the Jewish mindset that, while not yet embracing a vocabulary of monotheism, had some strict semantic parameters in place about what could hitherto be said of Yahweh/[the] LORD via his agents and what could not. I like using the word "hitherto" very much; by it, I am of course referring to the events surrounding the life of Jesus, whose Jewish followers felt obligated to modify and reorganise their own monotheistic semantics and God's place within it.

To inquire about the being of something in general [reference to ontology], we first need to inquire about the being that is the "that" of all being, that is to say, this being that exists in and through its mode of being understood.

This last quote is quite a lot of philosophical mumbo-jumbo and a difficult one to translate (for me), especially Ricœur's use of the preposition "sur" (typically simply "on", which I have rendered "in and through"). But if you get the contrast that Ricœur is driving his readers toward, especially when you are motivated by a key "conflict of interpretation" like I am in the case of fourth-century interpretations of the Trinity, we can maybe start to grasp the distinction in slightly less philosophical lingo. What I am saying is that Ricoeur is right in his drive to help us look at the mode of transmission of important theological information - we cannot strip it down naked so to speak. The bones always have flesh. But here is where we and the church can hit confusion because the very subject at hand is ontology (ousia, divine "substance" or "essence" linking the three Persons as one Godhead, then simply "God")! But we mustn't allow ourselves confusion between the packagin and the contents here, via this double usage of ontology. There is a "mode" at work of transmission of important theological information that has as much ontological importance as the ontology explicitly described.